Browsing by Subject "Alejo Carpentier"
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Item The artist among ruins: connecting catastrophes in Brazilian and Cuban cinema, painting, sculpture and literature(2013-12) Lopes De Barros Oliveira, Rodrigo; Arroyo-Martínez, Jossianna; Litvak, Lily, 1938-; Afolabi, Niyi; Davis, Diane; Fierro, Enrique; Salgado, CésarThis work is an attempt to create a constellation. In a constellation, some stars are greatly apart from each other. However, they appear on the same plane to our eyes. This method is derived from Walter Benjamin. Here I have, as my objet petit a, the pictorial, sculptural, cinematic and literary production of Brazil and Cuba from 1959 and beyond. As a barrier for creating meaning of such a vast content, I chose the theme of ruins, expanding when possible to its relatives: decay, catastrophe, debris, death, war, the lost paradise, the garden, intellectual thinking, utopia, dystopia, dreamworlds, rot, hope, human destruction, homelessness, and more. I work with figures of those two geographic regions, in which I think ruins—being inorganic, organic or abstract ones—have a major role in the work of: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Glauber Rocha, Orlando Jiménez Leal, Sabá Cabrera, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, Rogério Sganzerla, Néstor Almendros, Antonio José Ponte, Ramón Alejandro, and Francisco Brennand. This effort led me to reevaluate the classical concept of ruins in Western thought, which I think was relatively in force until World War I and which underwent a radical transformation after the advent of twentieth-century concentration camps, the domination by humans of atomic power, and the establishment of extremely high speeds for travels. I also propose that modern ruins acquire their full significance especially in the Third World. For, to the contrary of the central nations of capitalism, the Third World cannot be turned into ruins. It has already been born as such a thing. The aforementioned events just made this state of existence clearer.Item Faits divers : national culture and modernism in Third World literary magazines(2010-08) Micklethwait, Christopher Dwight; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Rossman, Charles; Ali, Samer; Salgado, Cesar; Wilks, Jennifer; Wolitz, SethCommitments to cosmopolitanism and indigenism complicate the Modernist literature of the Third World. This study investigates the rhetorical and aesthetic responses of Third World "little magazines"--short-running, self-financed cultural magazines--to these two notions. These little magazine evolved with the daily newspaper as a tool favored by avant-garde movements for critiquing the social structures that produced it and for codifying their aesthetic and political principles. Comparing the Stridentist little magazine Horizonte (1926-1927) to D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1925), I argue that the Mexican Revolution created a climate of nationalism that reoriented the Stridentist movement away from a version of cosmopolitanism influenced by European modernist movements and toward a deeper interest in the Mexican folk and indigenous culture. Following form there, I consider the concept of cosmopolitanism in the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier's El Reino de este mundo (1949) in comparison to two Haitian magazines: La Revue Indigène (1927-1928) and Les Griots (1938-1940). Here I find that, while Carpentier stages a relatively global critique of primitivism as a false cosmopolitanism, the magazines La Revue Indigène and Les Griots reflect a turn from such a cosmopolitanism that values the primitive for its own sake toward a cultural nationalism invested in the real and imagined recuperation of Haiti's African origins through the study of folklore, Vodou, the Kreyòl language and poetic images of Africa. Finally, I compare Futurist F. T. Marinetti's Mafarka le futuriste: roman africain (1909) to the Egyptian literary magazine Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī (1945-1948) in order to demonstrate the distance between Egyptian modernity in the European imagination and the self-conceived notions of Egyptian modernity. In Al-Kātib Al-Miṣrī, I find that these writers value cosmopolitanism, arguing that it is in fact indigenous to Egyptian culture itself and constructing their notion of Egyptian modernity around the maintenance of continuity with this indigenous cosmopolitanism. My examinations of these magazines suggests that, though the European avant-gardes and Third World literary Modernists may wield the little magazine similarly against hegemonic cultures, their purposes are divided over the roles cosmopolitanism and indigeneity play in the formation of national culture.Item Impossible harmonies: music, race and nation in the neobaroque novel(2015-05) Strong, Franklin Wallace, III; Salgado, César Augusto; Friedman, Alan; Moore, Lorraine; Moore, Robin; Wilks, Jennifer“Impossible Harmonies: Music, Race and Nation in the Neobaroque Novel” addresses questions of national identity and the literary uses of music as they apply to the writings of James Weldon Johnson, Alejo Carpentier and Ralph Ellison. I argue that each of these authors uses literary techniques that can be called neobaroque to interrogate the notion of harmony as a metaphor for national identity formation. While the idea of the Neobaroque is generally associated with Latin America, I take advantage of critical spaces opened up by recent work on the global Neobaroque to see Baroque traces in other postcolonial areas. And while the Neobaroque is described by Severo Sarduy and Linda Hutcheon as an art of disharmony, I argue instead that as these authors consider nationality from multi-racial perspectives, they work to reproduce the impossible harmonies (the phrase comes from a line in Carpentier’s 1974 novel, Concierto barroco) that dominate African-based music forms in the Americas. This dissertation addresses continuing controversies in the interpretation of each author’s work. Critics, for example, have read Carpentier’s preoccupation with form, which is closely connected to his love of music, as a reflection of un-subversive, even elitist tendencies. The charges makes sense: it is hard to reconcile the Beethoven-loving Carpentier who argued that novelists, like musicians, should work within predetermined forms in order to conform to “pressing spiritual needs” with the Carpentier who celebrated the formlessness of Havana’s cityscape in “La ciudad de las columnas” (“The City of Columns,” 1964). Similarly, Salim Washington argues that Johnson’s narrator’s quest for a music form that would combine black American music with Western classical music reflects Johnson’s assimilationist, “mulatto-based American nationalism.” This charge resonates with the central complaint of Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness (1997): that white Cubans intellectuals and artists, including Carpentier, appropriated black music forms in their construction of a mixed-race national identity. Where Johnson is accused of cultural betrayal, Moore argues that Carpentier participates in a sort of cultural hijacking. Without putting aside those objections, “Impossible Harmonies” recuperates the revolutionary potential of these authors’ texts.